The Love Crisis

Do people love differently today compared to the past? Many people choose to love their dogs and cats as once they loved their children. In biblical terms, do they love themselves more than their neighbors, preferring solitude over the small, continuous exchanges and dilemmas that come with partnership and domestic life?

Studies indicate that nowadays, when living as a couple, people tend to seek the same number of children as they did a couple of decades ago. The problem is that fewer people want to live as couples. The crucial change seems to be women’s choice to live alone. Of course, they have every right to choose what they believe makes them happier. However, this comes with visible consequences.

Twenty years ago, couples generally had at most one or two children, much less than the three or four common in the seventies or eighties, and the five or more typical in the forties to sixties.

The gradual reduction in the number of children can be attributed to other causes. While couples formed easily, what changed was the cost of each child and the choice to invest in the quality rather than the quantity of children. Education became the primary goal, seen as the tool for children to have a good life and to progress personally and within their families.

In the sixties to eighties, a professional would marry another university graduate, and together they could earn enough to provide a good education for their two or three children; they even aspired to send them to bilingual schools, as English was increasingly valued in the professional market.

Around that time, a crushing realization hit women. Annie Ernaux, the French Nobel Prize winner in literature, recounts how, after studying side by side with the man who would become her husband, graduating together, getting jobs together, on the first night they came home tired from work, her husband asked, “What’s for dinner?”

She was astonished. It turned out that the supposed role of a woman continued to involve managing what was bought, what was eaten, responding to teachers about the children, taking care of what clothes and school supplies were bought, etc. This remained intact despite all the women’s liberation, the struggle for gender equality, and the immense educational and labor efforts of women.

Between the nineties and the new century, master’s degrees and studying abroad became popular, alongside scholarships and travel. Education became increasingly expensive amid fierce competition. The quality of raising children has become prohibitively costly.

As a result, love for children became very expensive. Meanwhile, traveling became less expensive. It was no longer necessary to be wealthy to go abroad. Developed countries even opened scholarships or funding to attract and retain talent, which represents a transfer from poor to rich countries. A great irony. Given the cost of raising a professional, particularly with a master’s or doctorate abroad, for them to stay to live outside their home country.

Gradually, women began to assume both roles, that of mother and father; emancipation took new forms. From then on, the question arose whether one could do without the dead weight of a man who contributed little to the household, took on few domestic burdens, and even earned less. This was a tremendous change in roles, values, and everyday strategies.

The male crisis was not long in coming, and much has been written about it. Men have been losing the value they once had; their education does not prepare them for this, their academic results, on average, pale in comparison to women’s throughout school and university, and women are increasingly becoming independent from them.

It is not that this is “the fault” of women. Rather, they are the agents of this changing era, just as they were in the political struggles for universal suffrage a century ago, in the pill and sexual revolution sixty years ago, and in the transformation of the labor market. Once again, women are the agents of change in the constitution of families and the decision to have fewer children. They have been the most powerful agents of social change in the last 100 years.

This may also be due to a lag in men’s reactions to adapt to new realities and roles, and institutional changes taking too long to recognize what happened.

This was the state of families when the new century arrived: the internet, smartphones, social media, Tinder, and other love apps. This watershed moment happened inexorably and has only intensified. Today, twenty-five years into the new century, the data is overwhelming. The increasing cost of raising children has coincided with a cultural shift against forming couples. This seems to be the key cause of the decline in birth rates happening in many parts of the world.

According to projections, by the year 2100, China will have 600 million people, compared to 1.4 billion today. Europe will drop from 750 million people today to 580 million then, a decrease of 150 million. The rest of Asia and Africa may not suffer from the love crisis, and it’s possible that by the end of this century, four out of five human beings will live in those two continents.

In Latin America, the population could grow from 660 million today to 750 million by the end of this century, but in the second half, we will have begun an unstoppable decline. These numbers are a warning, but they could become alarming given the speed at which fertility rates are declining, especially in large cities.

Bogotá has a fertility rate of 0.89 (Fertility rate = Total number of births in a year / Number of women of childbearing age, 15-49 years), lower than Buenos Aires (1.10), New York (1.13), and even Tokyo (0.99). With so little love, or at least so little love for children, the population projections could collapse in a couple of decades.

The “paganinis” are the children who never were born. The choice of celibacy, professional careers, self-care, pets, travel, and intolerance towards family and domestic burdens, combined with the fact that smartphones and social media offer instant gratification at almost zero cost, have taken a toll on birth rates.

The new forms of partnership and love also conspire against procreation. In fact, they challenge the very definition of woman. There has been an effort to push women out of this definition, leaving them as “menstruating beings,” and claiming femininity for themselves. As if it were that easy. As if semantics were the problem. As if femininity had become merely a label.

I won’t mention the obvious impacts on the education system, kindergartens, schools, and universities; and the effects on healthcare and pension systems, which will be enormous and are just around the corner.

I am more intrigued by the origins of these social trends, which we have yet to fully understand. Studies and surveys are beginning to emerge that explore what happened, how, when, and why. Here we have only introduced the topic.

We are not only facing a crisis of love and love for children. The economy will not be the same again, nor will social life, family dynamics, or the emotional condition of women, men, teenagers, and children. This seems to me to be the most profound change of our era with far-reaching consequences this century brings.